The Ministry of National Education informs that, in order to include children aged between 3 and 6 in preschool education, the following stages will successively take place at the level of each educational institution:

• re-enrollment of children attending kindergarten this school year and who wish to attend in the 2018-2019 school year as well - will begin on May 7;
• enrollment of new children will take place starting May 21.

The schedule for re-enrollment and enrollment will be established by the management of the educational institution and will be posted, in a visible place, in each kindergarten, for the information of parents and the interested public, including on its website (if available), and possibly on the websites of school inspectorates.

The filling of vacant seats, after completing the re-enrollment process, will generally be done in descending order of age groups, as follows: big group (5-year-old children), middle group (4-year-old children), and small group (3-year-old children). Based on Government Decision no. 1.252/2012 and within the limit of available places, children aged between 2 and 3 can also be enrolled in the small group.

If, in an educational institution, the number of enrollment requests exceeds the number of available places, general tie-breaking criteria and specific tie-breaking criteria will be successively applied.

The general tie-breaking criteria are as follows:

• the existence of a document proving that a child is orphaned by both parents (the situation of a child from an orphanage/placement center/foster care is equivalent to that of a child orphaned by both parents);
• the existence of a document proving that the child is orphaned by one parent;
• the existence of a sibling enrolled in the respective educational institution;
• the existence of a medical certificate attesting the child’s disability status.

The specific tie-breaking criteria (developed by each preschool educational institution, approved by its Board of Administration and endorsed by the County School Inspectorate/of Bucharest until May 18) cannot be discriminatory and cannot include pre-enrollment lists. Also, the specific tie-breaking criteria will be applied only after exhausting the general criteria.

To ensure the transparency of the re-enrollment/enrollment process, the management of preschool educational institutions will publicly display, in plain sight, for all interested parties, the following information:

• the institution’s capacity (the number of children for which it was designed);
• the number of places approved by the schooling plan for the 2018-2019 school year (by age groups: small, middle, big);
• the general and specific criteria for enrolling children;
• the number of re-enrolled/enrolled children daily (during the set period) out of the total available.

We mention that private preschool educational institutions are also required to display in a visible place information regarding their status, specifically whether they are authorized to operate provisionally or accredited by the Agency for Quality Assurance in Pre-university Education (ARACIP).